Twisting Tongues

What does multilingual poetry do in a post-digital public space? In this book, comparative literature scholars Elisabeth Friis and Karin Nykvist discuss how multilingual poetry in Scandinavia today is a powerful intervention in poetics as well as in politics. In the wake of globalism and new paths of migration on the one hand, and regionalism and new nationalist movements on the other, poets and performance artists in the Nordic region find multilingual devices to be powerful and meaningful, making the form itself a political as well as an aesthetic choice. This book maps and theorizes the many multilingual devices and strategies used by contemporary authors related to the Nordic region in different ways – through birth, choice, coincidence or necessity – and extrapolates how their texts examine and negotiate the gap between a monolingual ideal historically related to the nation state and the multilingual reality of the 21st century. In multilingual poetry, language hierarchies, as well as ideas about purity and impurity, are challenged and examined. The volume’s theoretical point of departure is focused on theories of performativity, affect and intermediality, as well as specific theories of poetic enunciation. The volume concludes that multilingual poetry is always situated and oriented, not only in discourse and time, but also in actual geographical, physical and political space. This will not only be of interest to Nordic scholars and Scandinavian studies, but to the global field of studies in literary multilingualism.